2023 Oberlander winner

Excited to see that the idea of sponge cities has gotten Peking's Yu Kongjian recognized with the Oberlander Award. It is a well deserved honor for a transformational idea and an international leader in landscape architecture.

NJ's newest architecture school

Kean University has started the Michael Graves School of Architecture which will have a branch in NJ and a branch in China. The new Dean spoke with Architectural Review about the interesting arrangement.

Is geoempowerment a word?

Apparently. The latest issue of ArcNews has a great article on Kongjian Yu called "Geoempowering Design." As a landscape architect, Yu finds himself looking at the profession and trying to lead it towards more defensible design solutions that are societally relevant.

Turenscape used geodesign to develop the Shuicheng River and Minhu Wetland Park project. Concrete embankments along the river were removed, and natural vegetation was planted and allowed to thrive. Storm water is no longer diverted away from the river. Water no longer goes to waste. A once polluted waterway is fishable again. People stroll along walkways that wind around terraced ponds. Beautiful orange flowers flourish around the wetland's perimeter.

"Now, it's become a beautiful place," Yu said. "People love it. The biodiversity has increased. It has now become a national wetland."

To me, this represents a transformation in practice. Rapid changes in technology and the exponential growth in available land information have created a new opportunity for GIS to empower landscape architecture to address increasingly important societal problems, from climate change to food supply, while providing design solutions that are more defensible that the intuitive approaches of the past.

Turenscape is one of the most relevant firms out there. Geodesign is a big part of the reason.

Geodesign International Conference

2013 Geodesign International Conference will be held in October 28-29, 2013 in Beijing, China. This conference will be the joint effort of Peking University and ESRI, building upon recent advances in the US and elsewhere.

Many internationally renowned researchers, such as Carl Steinitz, Stephen Ervin, Bill Miller, Mike Goodchild, Ian Bishop, Christophe Girot, Henk Scholten, Doug Olson, as well as many other Geodesign related professionals will involve in the conference as keynote speakers or participants. 

Using GPS to ease traffic

MIT's Technology Review reports on a new strategy by Beijing to use GPS to combat traffic.

Landscape architectural examples from China

I feel like I have been hearing a lot about China this summer.  One of my colleagues visited at the start of the summer.  And the news stories I keep seeing make it seem more and more compelling.  And now I stumble into  these great photos of two major new parks in China:

The Garden of 10,000 Bridges by West 8
and
Turenscape's Shanghai Houtan Park

 Both are great examples from Landezine's master collection of searchable landscapes from around the world.  And if their photos don't work for you, maybe you should try Slate's beautiful photos of China's horrible algae problem.

Early Modern Chinese Cities

As China becomes an important shaper of the world, understanding the influence of its cities is important for planners.  As such, this could be a fascinating lecture:


Professor William T. Rowe (Ph.D. Columbia) is John and Diane Cooke Professor of Chinese History and current chairperson of the History Department at Johns Hopkins University. He established his reputation as a meticulous scholar with two studies on 19th-century Wuhan entitled Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (1984) and Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895 (1989) respectively.  More recently, he authored a biographical study on an 18th-century scholar-official and statecraft thinker (Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China, 2001), chronicled the socio-economic history of a Chinese county from the mid-14th century to the 1920s (Crimson Rain: Seven Centuries of Violence in a Chinese County, 2007), and published a new history of the last Chinese imperial dynasty (China's Last Empire: The Great Qing, 2009).

While cities in late medieval and early modern Europe have long been recognized for their "catalytic" role in the formation of the modern world, Chinese cities have been conceived, until very recently, as basically static and inherently unable to bring about the transformation of Chinese society from tradition to modernity.  In his talk, Professor Rowe will demonstrate just how wrong this earlier conception of the Chinese city was and how, in fact, Chinese cities from the sixteenth century onward became a focal point for the incremental but radical changes of Chinese society at large.  As a result of these changes, a distinctively urban culture developed, and a proliferation of old and new forms of voluntary organizations led to the challenge of the monopoly of authority claimed by the late imperial bureaucratic state and thus laid the foundation for the modern Chinese state.

Please visit us at http://www.ciru.rutgers.edu

Early Modern Chinese Cities: Catalysts for Historical Change by Prof. William T. Rowe from Johns Hopkins University
Time: 4:30 pm on Thursday, February 17, 2011
Venue: Room A, B & C Rutgers Brower Commons, 145 College Ave., New Brunswick, NJ 08902

Open to the Public, All are welcome

Better City, Better Life.

That's the basic idea of many urban designers, a better city would lead to better lives for the residents. It is also the theme of Shanghai Expo 2010, which implies to some degree that they agree with the premise and implies that Shanghai is a better city. Anyway, it looks like they'll get their 50 millionth visitor this week despite the Kazakhstan pavillion. 

Beijing Olympics

I think we are going to keep hearing lots about the design side of the Beijing 2008 Olympics, enough so that I might as well create a tag for it. There are plenty of story lines ranging from the design competition, the treatment of some Western designers, the high-profile venues, the rapid development of Chinese design talent, and the response as all the world rediscovers the amazing growth in design that China is experiencing. Anyway, Dwell has a story on Sasaki's design of the high-profile venues that helps set the stage for this continuing story.